Some thoughts on gun violence in the US

After this most recent high-profile shooting in Arlington by a radical extremist, who was also a white, American man, one would have thought that since he attacked them, the Senators might finally agree that we should all lay down our guns, but instead, they doubled down. EVERYONE has commended the Capitol police for their fast and efficient response, which resulted in the gunman being taken down and no other fatalities. The fact that armed, trained police shot the perpetrator is somehow supposed to provide support for the argument that if the civilians at the scene had guns, they could have shot the perpetrator. Maybe. But it might have just been a bloodbath in the spirit of Shootout at the OK Corral.

At any rate, point is, the result of this near tragedy has been for the lawmakers to want fewer, not more, restrictions on guns. This is the same lawmakers who wants to restrict Muslims from entering our country because of the “danger” that they pose to Americans.

Can we review just 2017 for  a moment please?

Americans killed by radical Islamic extremists in Jan-June 2017= 11 

• May 19, 2 people in Tampa
• April 18, 3 people in Fresno
• January 31, 1 person, Denver (this guy was a US Army vet who converted to Islam, so I would argue that he belongs in the next group.)
• January 6, 5 people, Ft Lauderdale

Muslims, non-Muslims mistaken for Muslims or non -Muslims defending Muslims all of whom were decidedly NOT radical Islamists killed by Americans in hate crimes in Jan-June 2017= 7:

• June 18, 2017: 17-year old Muslim girl beaten to death (Virginia)
• May 26, 2017: Two non-Muslim men stabbed to death by man after they defended Muslim girls he was harassing
• March 3, 2017: a 39-year old Sikh man shot and killed in driveway (FYI, Sikhs are NOT Muslims; they are Sikhs.) (Washington)
• Feb 28, 2017: African-American Muslim boy is found hung (Washington)
• Feb 2, 2017: two Indian men are gunned down in a bar in Kansas (Also NOT Muslims, but the guy who shot them defended himself by saying he THOUGHT they were Iraqis. Seriously???)

People killed in mass shootings on US soil by all other than radical Islamic terrorists in to Jan-June 2017=187

ONE-HUNDRED-EIGHT-SEVEN people killed in MASS SHOOTINGS by NON-Islamic extremists on American soil since the beginning of this year.

And that is just the tip of the iceberg.

Can we look at some other gun related statistics?

• Guns have killed over 7,000 people in the US so far this year (this includes nearly 1,000 killed by police and over 100 police killed)
• Annually suicide by gun kills approximately 22,000 people per year, so let’s be generous and say about 10,000 so far this year.

Globally terrorists have killed 4,000 people this year.

In the ENTIRE world, including the places such as Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq and Nigeria where ISIS and/or Boko Haram kill someone nearly everyday, just over half the number of Americans killed by Americans in America are killed by extremist terrorists.

The so-called “Constitutionists” scream that the second amendment protects our right to bear arms. Actually, if you want to take the second amendment at face value, literally, it seems to only allow citizens the right to bear arms in order to rise up a militia in order that they may fight on behalf of the government, or if needed, against an oppressive regime, such as the one they had left in England.

The Second Amendment of the United States Constitution reads: “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” Such language has created considerable debate regarding the Amendment’s intended scope. On the one hand, some believe that the Amendment’s phrase “the right of the people to keep and bear Arms” creates an individual constitutional right for citizens of the United States. Under this “individual right theory,” the United States Constitution restricts legislative bodies from prohibiting firearm possession, or at the very least, the Amendment renders prohibitory and restrictive regulation presumptively unconstitutional. On the other hand, some scholars point to the prefatory language “a well regulated Militia” to argue that the Framers intended only to restrict Congress from legislating away a state’s right to self-defense.

Other Westernized and developed countries have stricter gun laws and fewer deaths by guns. I am aware that correlation is not necessarily causation, but this seems to be a pretty strong link. Fewer guns + stricter laws on guns = fewer deaths by guns.

Apparently, in 2014 we had more guns per capita than any country on earth: 88.1 guns per 100 people.

We have more homicide by guns than almost any country on earth trailing only Columbia, Iraq, Brazil and El Salvador.

We have more than twice the rate of suicide by guns than Australia, Canada, the UK and most other countries.

And yet, we continue to shout about the danger of Muslims:

From 2011 -2015, “Muslims carried out only 11 out of the 89 attacks, yet those attacks received 44 percent of the media coverage. (Meanwhile, 18 attacks actually targeted Muslims in America…)”

Sadly, I think the greatest thing we have to fear is…ourselves.